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As part of Americans for the Arts’ recent Strategic Realignment Process, we were asked to evaluate our storytelling communications platforms and evolve the way we share content. As a result, we launched the Designing Our Destiny portal to explore new ways of telling stories and sharing information, one that is consistent with our longtime practice of, “No numbers without a story, and no stories without a number.”

As we put our energy into developing this platform and reevaluate our communications strategies, we have put ArtsBlog on hold. That is, you can read past blog posts, but we are not posting new ones. You can look to the Designing Our Destiny portal and our news items feed on the Americans for the Arts website for stories you would have seen in ArtsBlog in the past.

ArtsBlog will remain online through this year as we determine the best way to archive this valuable resource and the knowledge you’ve shared here.

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America's Creative Economy

The Creative Economy Coalition or CEC, a Working Group of the National Creativity Network, decided to inaugurate a project that directly led to the creation of this report. As organizations charged with responsibility for serving the creative economy in their respective regions came together starting in 2010 to discuss common issues,  challenges and opportunities, they increasingly found  
it difficult to share a common language around both definition and measurement.

This research project was designed to profile and analyze how the creative economy is currently being defined,  segmented and quantified throughout the United States of America. We assessed what we can learn from  aggregating creative economy profiles, and whether there is the possibility of producing a ‘core’ national profile definition and accompanying data descriptors.The following research questions were posed:

  1. How are ‘creative economy/industries’ currently being defined around the United States by those entities that have articulated a mission to serve the creative  industries? The words creative economy/industries are used together because this nomenclature is used interchangeably across the country. This report gives an overview of the written definitions being used for the creative economy as well as the actual descriptors and datasets used to measure them.
  2. What position and value do nonprofit arts organizations have in this profiling, and how are they being impacted by the creative economy?  Whether organizations which have produced a creative economy profile did or did not address the nonprofit arts sector directly was unknown until the information was collected and collated.  Therefore, it was unclear whether or not this question could be answered from this research. [Exective Summary]

This research project was designed to profile and analyze how the creative economy is currently being defined,  segmented and quantified throughout the United States of America. We assessed what we can learn from  aggregating creative economy profiles, and whether there is the possibility of producing a ‘core’ national profile definition and accompanying data descriptors [Executive Summmary]

Report
Harris, Christine, M.Sc; Collins, Margaret, M.A.; and Dennis Cheek, Ph.d
146
August, 2013
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Publisher Reference: 
National Creativity Newtork
Research Abstract
Categories: 
Creative Economies
Creative Industries
Creative Workforce
Economic Impact
Image Thumbnail of Pub Cover: 
August 2013